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Wednesday, 30 July 2014

Souls For Sale - Scavengers

The next review from my physical pile now. Souls For Sale are a heavy band from Bielefeld in Germany. They released Scavengers on various formats in 2013 with the help of Wooaaargh Records, Puzzle Records and Olympus Mons Records. They've been busy playing shows recently with the fast rising Depravation and are due to play with Bane in August! They've also just finished recording 8 new tracks, which will see the light of day at some point I'm sure.

Tracklist:-

1. The Great Deluge
2. Walking On Pain Street
3. Scavengers In Suits
4. Fromselflootingtoanassualtdrivenapproachofbreakingfree
5. The King Of Kong
6. The Circus Is In Town
7. Zielenvisserij
8. The Libya Gundown Incident
9. Dead Men Tell No Tales
10. Acquainted Black
11. Almeria

The first thing I noticed about Souls For Sale, even before I listened to Scavengers, was their knack for a good song title. I mean The King Of Kong is classic and god only knows what Fromselflootingtoanassualtdrivenapproachofbreakingfree could be about! Anyway….moving on. Scavengers starts with The Great Deluge, which is an intro featuring brooding guitar and building guitar feedback/dissonance. In my opinion, it goes on for a little longer than it needs to, but that’s by-the-by. Walking On Pain Street is where Scavengers really kicks off, with plenty of noisy, grinding hardcore. Middle-class, pretty boy hardcore this ain’t. It’s all angry screams, punk-laden riffs and screaming leads.

Out of left-field, Scavengers In Suits goes all thrash metal on your ass. It’s fast and wild, with a background of piercing drums and bouncing bass. This is definitely circle pit material! That thrashing mentality spills over into the obscenely long-titled Fromselflooting…, except in this song there’s a breakdown of sorts and some great melodic riffs. The King Of Kong would be great background music for an intense Mario Kart session. The screams get indecipherable and riffs get thrashier. Can you tell I’m enjoying it yet!

Things take a more hardcore turn on The Circus Is In Town and it even features some rock n roll vibes. It’s super fast song too, at under two-minutes. Zielenvisserij, judging by the sample at the start, is an anti-religious song. I’m all for anti-religion and I don’t mind admitting it. The less gullible people there are following false gods, the fewer wars there would be. Seems pretty obvious to me! Souls For Sale hit their brutal stride with The Libya Gundown Incident. It’s the closest they get to a chuggy, full-on metal song. They go long on Dead Men Tell No Tales, which is nearly seven-minutes in length and builds on the chuggyness of the previous track. Don’t worry though, it’s far from boring, with plenty in subtle textures and melodies thrown in for good measure.

Acquainted Black is mightily heavy, in a clever way. It’s not all fire and brimstone, instead Souls For Sale put big guitars alongside blackened-hardcore screams that sit behind them. This makes the sound stage pretty much at the heaviest it has been on the album. It leads to closer Almeria, which is strikingly good. The well-thought out melodic guitar that accompanies the paired back instrumentation takes Scavengers in another direction and shows a different to the band. In an album of twists and turns, it’s an extremely pleasing moment from a band that are very at home experimenting. They’ve definitely got the musical chops to go higher and reach wider audiences.

You can stream and download Scavengers here and you can buy LP, tape and CD versions of it from the page too:-